Cannabis Prisoners in America

Last verified: April 2026

How Many Remain?

The exact number of people incarcerated for cannabis in the United States is unknown — a fact that is itself an indictment of the system. The Last Prisoner Project estimates approximately 40,000 people remain behind bars for cannabis-related offenses.

At the federal level, roughly 1,250 people are in the Bureau of Prisons for marijuana trafficking. Senator Elizabeth Warren's 2024 analysis found "at least 3,000" federal inmates serving time for cannabis offenses beyond simple possession.

State-level numbers are "orders of magnitude greater" than federal, but they are poorly tracked because most state prison systems do not separately categorize cannabis offenses from other drug charges. Many people serving time for cannabis are coded as "drug trafficking" or "controlled substance" offenses without further specificity.

Richard DeLisi: 32 Years for Cannabis

Richard DeLisi was sentenced to 90 years in Florida in 1989 for cannabis trafficking. The state sentencing guidelines called for 12 to 17 years. The judge imposed a sentence more than five times the upper guideline range.

While DeLisi was in prison, his wife died. Both of his parents died. His son died. The State of Florida spent an estimated $1,673,670 to keep him incarcerated.

The Last Prisoner Project took on his case. On December 8, 2020, after serving 32 years, DeLisi was released. He had entered prison at age 40. He walked out at 72. He has since launched DeLisioso, a cannabis brand, working in the same industry that the state imprisoned him for.

Michael Thompson: 25 Years in a Legal State

Michael Thompson was sentenced to 40 to 60 years in Michigan in 1994 for selling 3 pounds of cannabis to a confidential informant. He was 44 years old.

In 2018, Michigan legalized recreational cannabis. Dispensaries opened across the state. Thompson sat in his cell while customers legally purchased the same product he was imprisoned for selling. He contracted COVID-19 in prison at age 69.

His case drew national attention. Kim Kardashian, Chelsea Handler, the Last Prisoner Project, and a public campaign that generated 150,000 messages to the governor pushed for his release. Governor Gretchen Whitmer commuted his sentence on December 22, 2020, after Thompson had served 25 years.

Weldon Angelos: 55 Years for $900

Weldon Angelos was a first-time offender sentenced to 55 mandatory years in federal prison for selling $900 worth of cannabis while possessing a firearm. The federal judge who imposed the sentence, Paul Cassell, publicly called it unjust but said mandatory minimums left him no choice.

Angelos served 13 years before his release. He received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump in 2020. Since his release, he has founded The Weldon Project and Mission Green, organizations that advocate for cannabis prisoners. His case was instrumental in building support for the First Step Act, the bipartisan criminal justice reform law.

Bernard Noble: 13 Years for 2 Joints

Bernard Noble was sentenced to 13.3 years in Louisiana for possessing two marijuana joints. Louisiana's habitual offender statute elevated what would otherwise have been a minor possession charge into a lengthy sentence based on prior convictions.

Noble was paroled in 2018 after serving 7.3 years for what most Americans would not consider a crime.

The Moral Paradox

The core injustice is not complicated. People are incarcerated in states where the conduct they were convicted of is now legal and commercially celebrated.

Michael Thompson sat in a Michigan prison cell while dispensaries operated legally in the same state. Illinois pardoned 800,000 cannabis charges while others with slightly different charges — charges that carried additional elements like distribution amounts that pushed them past the pardon threshold — remained convicted and incarcerated.

The distinction between a cannabis record that gets automatically expunged and one that keeps someone in prison is often a matter of grams, of which county the arrest occurred in, of whether the charge included an additional element that takes it outside the scope of reform. These are legal technicalities, not moral distinctions.

Beyond the Headlines

DeLisi, Thompson, Angelos, and Noble became known because advocacy organizations and public figures took up their cases. For every high-profile case, there are thousands of people serving cannabis sentences without media attention, without celebrity advocates, and without the resources to mount effective legal challenges.

The estimated 40,000 who remain are disproportionately Black and Latino, disproportionately from low-income communities, and disproportionately sentenced under habitual offender laws that stacked cannabis charges into decades-long terms. Their freedom depends on the same political will that has been slow to arrive for the less visible parts of cannabis reform.